"
Why are black people overrepresented in gifs or memes on the Internet?
Ask two journalists from the Bondy blog, in a video published on Scroll, a video platform developed by the online news site and dedicated to content relating to new digital media. Émilie Duhamel and François Oulac refer to certain images that have gone viral on social networks and messaging applications, often extracted from films or video sequences and then diverted in a parodic way to illustrate emotions or reactions with a very meaningful facial expression. Well known, some of them are photos of black people, like this photo of actor Kayode Ewumi with his finger to the temple, which seems to express a clever idea and which has become essential on social networks. There are others,and certainly the regulars of social networks have them well in mind when reading these lines.
Read also: Facebook bans "blackfaces" and anti-Semitic stereotypes
Yes but now, for the two journalists, using images of black people to make humor on social networks, it is assimilated to ... blackface.
That is to say, a practice considered racist, because it consists in exaggerating and propagating racist stereotypes about blacks.
The "
blackface
" usually designates the fact of making up in black when you are white: often shouted at by the woke movement on social networks, it has earned Gérard Darmon, Antoine Griezmann or even a theater company playing a A play by Aeschylus at the Sorbonne theater, to attract the wrath of certain radical anti-racists.
"
When we excessively use humorous images with only black people, it is called digital blackface
" therefore explain the two journalists, adding that "
black people, on the Internet or in digital spaces, already suffer from a deficit. representation, that is to say that they are not seen as full human beings, but often reduced to two or three stereotypes: blacks are seen as very expressive, dance well, they make funny faces and they are funny
”.
A concept already used by the New York Times
In the viewfinder, the authors of this video (who did not invent the concept of “
digital blackface
”, which we already find denounced in similar terms in a publication of the New York Times of 2017, then in many many other articles in the American press in recent years) also have their sights set on "
black emojis used by white people
", that is to say the fact for example of posting a black thumb while you have white skin, which is now possible since emojis are available, for some, in several different skin colors.
Journalists also denounce the resumption, for example in the video game Fortnite, of African cultural dances.
Again, according to them, this is a “
cultural appropriation
” which propagates racist stereotypes.
Read also: The left in the trap of racialism
Great lords, the videographers do not plead for a formal ban of this kind of practice ... but nevertheless suggest Internet users to resort more to humorous images this time using the facial expressions of white actors.
Among the torrent of negative reactions to this video, judged severely by many Internet users, several of them point out that if blacks were under-represented in the viral images circulating on the Internet, some would be tempted to see it as an invisibilization of people of color ... So goes woke thinking and its denunciation of "
systemic racism
": heads, I'm right, tails, you're wrong.